Skip to content

.tips

236 small things, one a day. short enough to read between two other things, with a feed if you want them delivered.

.today

one small thing a day.

Sample traces at the tail, keep every error

Head-based sampling at 10 percent throws away 90 percent of failures, because the coin is flipped before the request knows it's going to fail. Decide at the end instead: keep everything with an error or above p99, plus 2 percent of the rest by trace id.

tail_sampling:
  decision_wait: 30s
  policies: [status_code: ERROR, latency: 800ms, probabilistic: 2]

Set decision_wait longer than your slowest request, or the slow ones get dropped as "not slow yet".

observabilityopentelemetry

.october

2026, 4 tips.

subprocess.run takes a list, not a shell string

pythonsecurity

subprocess.run only fails loudly with check=True

python

Use :focus-visible instead of removing the outline

accessibilityfrontend

Intl.Collator sorts names the way a reader expects

javascripti18n

.september

2026, 19 tips.

The outbox row goes in the same transaction

queuesdistributed-systems

A live region announces the status your spinner only shows

accessibilityfrontend

A secret mount keeps the token out of the image

dockersecurity

toSorted when the array is not yours to reorder

javascript

Wrap list responses in an object, not a bare array

api-designhttp

Bump a version in the cache key instead of flushing

cachingoperations

The dialog element handles focus and Escape for you

accessibilityfrontend

node --env-file replaces dotenv

nodejstooling

Upload the CI artifact with if: always()

ci

A batch endpoint needs a result per item

httpapi-design

Cache the misses too, on a shorter TTL

cachingperformance

Make the container's root filesystem read-only

dockersecurity

Jitter cache TTLs so keys do not expire together

cachingperformance

PATCH bodies as application/merge-patch+json

api-designhttp

datetime.now(UTC), not utcnow()

python

zip(strict=True) catches lists that drifted apart

python

Coalesce cache misses so one key loads once

cachingperformance

Exec-form CMD so SIGTERM reaches your process

dockeroperations

Copy the lockfile before the source in a Dockerfile

dockerci

.august

2026, 2 tips.

Honour Retry-After before your own backoff

httpreliability

Stream the response, the first token is the loading indicator

ai-engineeringfrontend